Wave-Motion Tuning Fork

No scorch marks.

A specific kind of Energy Weapon consisting of two or more prongs separated by an empty space. The blast from this type of weapon is generated within the space or fired through it, often heralded by crackling streams of energy zipping between the prongs as the weapon charges. Expect the energy to go out of control and explode violently if one of the prongs is damaged before firing.

How the energy being charged does not simply disperse into the air is never really touched upon, although, one can expect a Hand Wave along the lines of "Magnets." Suffice to say, the audience shouldn't even feel compelled to question this logic, because it looks really freaking awesome, to the point where things like reality just aren't very important anymore.

Some times a regular, less powerful weapon may be able to open up into one of these for a truly staggering blast, which is where this trope gets its name.

Compare Breath Weapon, its sort-of "organic" counterpart.

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Examples:

Anime and Manga

• The larger energy weapons in the Macross series (and by extension Robotech) are of this design. Some of the ships of the titular class even used the arms of a Humongous Mecha mode as "prongs".
  • The Trope Codifier was the original Super Dimension Fortress Macross itself, whose bow separated to form its Wave-Motion Gun.
    • The Zentraedi's ship-mounted cannons had a sort of baby-version of this look to them.
  • Macross Frontier gives us a private military version of the SDF called the Macross Quarter. About 1/4 the size of Battle Frontier, she carries a Heavy Quantum Cannon. This tri-prong, splitting weapon of mass destruction, though new in the pantheon of Macross wonder weapons and not as powerful as Battle Frontier's Wave-Motion Gun, still has enough power to take out a Vajra battleship double (and even a little more) its own size. Instead of firing a single beam from between the prongs, each prong fires its own beam which cycles down the "rail-gun" structure and "twists" together with the other beams into a combined spiraling stream of energy.
  • Also in Macross Frontier, we have one of the most advanced Variable Fighters, the VF-27 Lucifer, with a smaller version of the Heavy Quantum Cannon. The gun splits into a dual-prong energy "rail-gun" that takes a cue from its bigger brother armed on the Quarter. While not as obviously powerful, it can take out a medium-sized Vajra with one shot.
    • The second movie gives the YF-29 Durandal one similar to the VF-27's, only it opens vertically instead of horizontally.
  • Macross Delta gives us yet another fighter example in the form of the SV-262 Draken, which also has a gunpod that works this way, albeit with the widening of the firing barrel being barely visible. The Draken was also sufficiently powerful to be able to fire the thing with two engines (both the Lucifer and the Durandal needed four) and it would have easily taken the cake of the most powerful variable fighter in the Macrossverse had it not had the rather glaring flaw of no built in missile launchers.
  • The Tie-In Novel The End Of The Circle, an Exiled from Continuity Grand Finale to the unproduced Robotech II: The Sentinels, has the homeworld of the Haydonites transformed into what seemed to be a planetary-scale Humongous Mecha. As a allied fleet attempts to attack the planet, Exedore only realizes too late that the "limbs" are the forks of a gigantic Reflex Cannon.
• In Fafner in the Azure: Dead Aggressor and its prequel movie, a number of the energy weapons exhibit this feature, being swords that split down the middle to fire energy blasts. The practical purpose of this feature is shown by the separating halves of the blade creating a hole in an enemy's force field through which a shot can be fired.
• Raising Heart from Lyrical Nanoha has a "Cannon Mode", in which its half-crescent knob turns 90 degrees and extends, forming this type of weapon, while a gun grip and trigger forms on the other side. The explanation is simple.
  • Bureau L-class spaceships also have a tuning fork structure on the prow, and once the Asura gets upgraded with the Arc-en-Ciel, the resulting weapon can level continents.
• Done a number of times in the various Gundam series:
  • The Nu Gundam's Fin Funnels work this way, and can also generate a beam shield as needed.
  • Tallgeese III's megacannon, which has variable power modes. In maximum output mode, the form that uses the Tuning Fork, its power output is roughly equal to Wing Zero's Twin Buster Rifle, but It Only Works Once; afterwards Tallgeese is drained of power and needs assistance to get back to full functionality.
  • Gundam Virtue's GN Bazooka (pictured) would split and extend for its Full Burst Mode. Later on, the Gadessa sported a three-barrelled variant that could separate the barrels to form a weapon of this type.
    • so is Virtue's later generation, Seravee Gundam, which can launch an Energy Ball.
• Digimon has two of these: Beelzemon's gun opens in such a manner before firing, and the lion head design on Lowemon's chest can do a fairly unusual version of it; the mouth opens, and a sphere of black energy swirls into existence between the jaws. A yellow beam is then fired from deep inside the mouth, through the black sphere, and the enemy is struck with a black-and-yellow blast.
  • A third one later appears in Digimon Adventure: (2020) with MetalGreymon Alteros Mode (named after the instance of this used by Virus MetalGreymon X), which trades MetalGreymon's organic right arm for one of these.
• The Oratorio #8 Kill Sat in Eureka Seven.
• The wing-mounted beam cannons from the Knight Sabers' gunship in Bubblegum Crash!
• The Artemis from My-HiME uses this for its main weapon
• Trinity Blood: When Abel cranks the Crusnik up to 80%, his wings act as one of these.
• Transformers: Cybertron: When powered up by his Cyber Key, one of Optimus Prime's Super Mode BFGs opens up the barrel to create one of these.
• The wands in Little Witch Academia are of this design. The spells come out from between the prongs.
• In Bleach, Ichigo's second Hollow form and the artificial Hollow White charge and fire their Ceros from between their horns , which is fitting, as White is the source of Ichigo's Hollow. This is actually used against Ichigo when Ulquiorra cuts off one of the horns as he's charging the Cero, which makes it go out of control and explode in his face, which also shatters his mask and knocks him out of his Superpowered Evil Side.
• In Zoids, the Berserk Fuhrer's three-pronged "eggbeaters" function this way, as well as opening up to create energy shields or function as blades on their own. Though the Liger Zero X never appeared in animated form, its two-pronged lightning dischargers presumably work similarly.
• In Medabots, Arcbeetle forms one of these weapons with a spike on its head and chest, meant to evoke the horns of a hercules beetle.
• At the end of the second season of the A Certain Scientific Railgun anime, Therestina Kihara opens a giant lance-like weapon to reveal it as one of these, consisting of eight prongs with electricity dancing between them. The weapon was built to imitate Mikoto Misaka's natural railgun superpower, ultimately firing a powerful energy beam from the center.

Comic Books

• In the IDW Transformers comics, Decepticon leader Megatron was re-built into a new body with an alt-mode of a flying wing, reminiscent of the B2 bomber. In robot mode, the tips of the flying wing joined together to form a double-boomed version of his signature arm-mounted BFG. This feature was replicated in toy form several months later.

Films — Live-Action

• Star Trek: Nemesis: While the Scimitar was destroyed before it could fire its thalaron weapon, the individual emitters were shown to have several booms joined together by a ring. The weapon is presumably fired from the center of the emitter.
• The Federation Dreadnought-class battleship USS Vengeance in Star Trek Into Darkness mounts a pair of these which deploy from a retractable mount on the forward hull. They are used to target the USS Enterprise. However, they fail to fire due to Scotty sabotaging the Vengeance's computer.
• The stun guns used in the Battle Room in the film version of Ender's Game look like this.
• The warship-mounted railgun that's used to kill Devastator in Transformers: Revenge of The Fallen takes this shape, horizontally oriented.

Literature

• As mentioned on the Wave Motion Gun page, Larry Niven's 1985 novel Ringworld Engineers presents an early version of this trope in the Wunderland Treatymaker, a Kill Sat just short of Death Star class. It fired a parallel pair of beams — one to suppress the negative charge on sub-atomic particles such as electrons, while the other suppressed the positive charge on particles like protons. Between them they generated an incredible electrical potential, and in turn enough electrical current to melt and then vaporize rock. The only time it was used on a planet, the result of dragging its beams across the planet's surface resulted in a canyon twenty miles across and twelve miles deep, and nearly two hundred long.

Live-Action TV

• In Babylon 5, the main guns of the Vorlon ships have exactly this kind of devices as their main weapons. The beam is formed in middle of four "prongs", overlapping with Converging-Stream Weapon.
  • The spin-off series Crusade has the starship Excalibur. It has a reverse-engineered Vorlon style main gun. Unfortunately, the power plant is not quite up to the requirements of the Wave-Motion Gun, so it has to be restarted after firing, rendering the ship unable to maneuver or fire any guns for approximately one minute.
• In the Doctor Who episode Time Heist:
  • The Teller pushes his eye stalks together when liquifying the brains of his targets.
  • The dimensional shift bomb has two folding flanges that the Doctor extends like this to set it.
• D'Argo's Qualta blade from Farscape is a fairly well-justified example; it's a normal sword most of the time, but he can open it up, forming a gun of roughly this configuration; there's a barrel at the back end, and the "prongs" don't seem to do anything when it's a gun; seeing as they're the sword blade, they're still fairly useful.
• In a much smaller scale, the Street Hawk motorcycle's nose-mounted laser.
• The GUTS Wing 2 planes from Ultraman Tiga and Ultraman Dyna.
• Power Rangers Samurai/Samurai Sentai Shinkenger: The Beetle Blaster Megazord/Kabuto Shinken-Oh's finishing move involves the Beetle's horns forming a Wave-Motion Tuning Fork that spins.

Tabletop Games

• Tau railguns in Warhammer 40,000 look like this, but normal pulse weapons have a case around the rails.
• In the old edition of Warhammer rpg game, wizards used an actual tuning fork as a material component when casting lightning bolt spell.
• Plasma Forks are an entire class of Plasma weapons in Starfinder, with variations in pistol, long arm, and heavy weapons.

Video Games

• Armored Core 2 has a dual Arm Cannon version as a Shout-Out, but the effect is less like a Wave-Motion Gun and more like a barrage of plasma bolts.
  • While Armored Core has had Railguns, which doesn't count for this trope, the so-called Railguns in Nexus and Last Raven does not, in fact, fire solid projectiles and in fact fire energy cannons. Models such as the arm-mounted YWH16HR-PYTHON and the back-mounted CR-WBW98LX (previously CWX-LIC-10 in 3/Silent Line). In the Python's case, the weapon is actually three-pronged!
• Invoked with the design of the Royal Highlander in BattleTech which features two long, thin, diamond-shaped armor plates surrounding the hardpoints on its right arm, whose default weapon is a Gauss Rifle, more or less the most powerful ballistic weapon in the game. The Gauss Rifle's actual barrel is a vaguely triangle-shaped cylinder, however. Downplayed with the other Post-Amaris Civil War Highlander variants who have a pair of bare mounting rails instead.
• The Covenant Plasma Rifle and Plasma Pistol from the Halo series. As might be expected, their workings have raised quite a bit of speculation but one of the more prominent ones is that the prongs supercharge air molecules between them and accelerate the resulting plasma out with a magnetic field. Better to just play the game.
  • The "seldom explained" bit is justified in that the Covenant have (poorly) reverse-engineered all their technology from the ruins of the extinct Forerunners who they worship as gods. The Covenant don't understand how it works because attempting to do so runs the risk of being seen as heresy (since everything Forerunner-related is considered holy). The humans don't understand how it works because they're not anywhere near advanced enough to have anything like it.
• Divine Beast Vah Naboris in The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild uses this to a lesser extent. The camel-like beast has two ears which rotate up 90 degrees to charge and fire a homing laser (and later, a Wave-Motion Gun) from the space between them and in front of its face.
• Haken Browning of Super Robot Wars OG Saga: Endless Frontier uses the "Longtomb Special", a Hand Cannon with an incredibly long barrel that, when used during his Limit Break, splits the barrel open into three prongs to fire Frickin' Laser Beams. Notably, the actual barrel of the Longtomb Special remains between the prongs.
• In Super Robot Wars Advance, the Ash Saver's "Halberd Launcher" is a Personal Trooper-sized version of this, firing a main beam that splits into several smaller beams at the target.
• The Van and Aerotank (and presumably the dumbed out Van Leader) enemies in Phantasy Star II have a variation on this: the large, vertical "slab" in front rotates 90 degrees, opens sideways, a crackling of energy is seen inside, and it launches an energy blast.
• The Lightning Gun from Quake and Quake III: Arena.
• The nose of the Vic Viper from Gradius is shaped like this, and is even used as such in some art/adaptations.
• Homeworld makes good use of this:
  • Homeworld and Homeworld: Cataclysm: the Taiidani Sajuuk Cor Ion Frigate has a forward-mounted ion cannon that sports not two but four accelerator units around its axis.
  • Homeworld 2: the Sajuuk actually inverts this trope in that the weapon is composed of two angular trenches running across the sides of the entire ship and the vertical fork on the front which is only the muzzle. When the weapon fires, a golden-orange energy stream fills the trenches from the rear to the front; when the stream reaches the fork, anything that happens to be less than ten kilometres in front of it is dead (unit spoiler!).
• In MARDEK 2, the Dracelon boss monster has one as a claw. The two prongs also open out to 180° when it uses its Lightning Storm attack.
• The mass relays from Mass Effect fit the "tuning fork" description, even though they're not weapons. Though given their importance to pan-galactic travel, they could be considered a delivery system. And they are an important component in the Reapers' cycle of destruction.
  • On the other hand, they could fit this trope completely if used to deliver a nuke to destroy the mass relay on the other end. While relays are ridiculously tough, if one does go up the result is quite spectacular.
    • The krogan also built ground-to-orbit cannons that are designed in this way. In Mass Effect 3 a side mission is to head to one such facility◊ and secure it to prevent Cerberus using it to shoot down friendly ships.
• The Bullet Hell arcade game Cyvern has the green dragon, who fires the beam from prongs on its wings.
• Warp Rifles in UFO Aftershock.
• The D-Rex boss in Mega Man X has a weapon like this.
• In later Virtual-ON games, the Temjin exhibits this, with its beam rifle's barrel splitting open to allow it to fire a supercharged shot. Given that the rifle is not only also its sword, but a flying surfboard too, this raises one or two questions about the weapon designers in that game...
  • Raiden's melee attack is something of a subversion. Its shoulder cannon is more similar to a parabolic dish, but its melee attack uses that shoulder-mounted weapons in a fork-like configuration complete with arcing electricity.
• The Tesla Cannon in Fallout 3's Broken Steel DLC and Fallout: New Vegas.
• The Monado in Xenoblade Chronicles 1 is a Laser Blade and not a ranged weapon, but otherwise fits this trope, with the physical part of the sword splitting in two to create a projector for the energy component of the blade.
• Metro 2033's Volt Driver/Hellbreath railgun is a Scavenger World version that fires ball bearings magnetically accelerated through two prongs held together by places and screws. It's one of the most powerful weapons in both games.
• Unreal has the Dispersion Pistol, the Evolving Ray Gun that goes from Ranged Emergency Weapon to Hand Cannon, become this depending on the number of upgrades. With one, it's a perfect example, while with three it has a proper barrel but with "tuning fork" prongs on the sides, while after the fourth it has even more prongs on top.
• Doom (2016)'s Gauss Cannon works a lot like this, due to its railgun-style design.
• Zarya's Particle Cannon from Overwatch. Winston's Tesla Cannon has a shape similar to a tuning fork, but has a much shorter range compared to other weapons of this trope.
• This is the visual cue in Stellaris for a battleship carrying a spinal mount weapon or, in Apocalypse, a titan. The exact designs vary from archetype to archetype — the reptilians and mammalians have the most conventional application of this, while the molluscoid "prongs" are shaped like tentacles — but it's always there as a shorthand for "this ship is carrying a weapon that will devastate your capital ships and static defenses".
• Pokémon Sun and Moon introduced Vikavolt, an insectoid Pokémon whose mandibles charge and launch electricity in this way.
• In Ratchet: Deadlocked, the Fusion Rifle works this way, unique as it's a sniper rifle.
• Uni's weapon in the Neptunia series when transformed is a BFG with this kind of design on it.
• In FTL: Faster Than Light, all beam weapons have two prongs between which the laser comes out. The glaive beam additionally has a ring at the end of the fork.

Webcomics

• A Miracle of Science: Benjamin's railgun is a (large) pistol-sized example. The Martian Cadence Lance is also fired from between two prongs, though they form a notch in a semicircle rather than being linear rails.

Western Animation

• Megatron's first transmetal form in Beast Wars has him equipped with a two-pronged arm cannon. That glows purple. The clamplike prongs, however, are more akin to a hand than anything else and are occasionally used as such when he's not blasting things.
• An unused concept sketch for a Transformers/G.I. Joe crossover was of Megatron with an alternate mode of a Cobra helicopter/tank. The vehicle's three rotors formed a Shoulder Cannon in robot mode.
• Tirek, the Big Bad from the My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic episode "Twilight's Kingdom", uses the space between his horns to cast magic spells and throw earth-shattering fireballs.

Real Life

• The Free Electron Laser is a piece of awesome technology that matches this trope, complete with being especially good at being tuned for various emitted frequencies of radiation. The FEL forces a stream of electrons at relativistic speeds to pass through an optical cavity (the "fork") containing alternating magnetic fields (the "wave motion" component), and depending on the strength of the alternative magnetic field (the "tunable" component), the resulting synchrotron radiation produces photons at controllable power levels and frequencies. The technology is quite versatile and has applications in scientific research and medicine, but also as a powerful directed energy weapon for military applications.
• Railguns work by discharging capacitors through rails connected to the positive and negative capacitor poles with the projectile completing the circuit generating an electromagnetic field, this accelerates it depending on the charge of the capacitors. Modern railguns can fire projectiles faster than 7x the speed of sound.
  • Because a railgun needs far more instantaneous power output than most storage systems can supply, they usually need to warm up before a shot—either by charging a capacitor bank or spinning a carbon-fiber flywheel to high speeds—although this probably won't produce any light show at the tuning-fork end. They also tend to produce a massive muzzle flash of sparks due to the high voltages and the incredibly fast wear of all the materials involved. Some railguns even fire plasma instead of metal slugs. In other words, railguns pretty much are wave-motion tuning forks.
• Nitrogen lasers excite the nitrogen in the air in order to amplify ambient light into about 200 randomly occurring powerful laser bursts per minute, which make a pretty impressive rapid fire pulse laser.

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